‘We Shall Go On to the End’

‘The Last Lion,’ by William Manchester and Paul Reid

The second volume of William Manchester’s best-selling life of Winston Churchill, published in 1988, left the newly appointed British prime minister in May 1940 standing on the verge of his “finest hour.” Manchester began work on the third and final volume, but the project was halted in 1998 when he suffered two strokes. “Language for me came as easily as breathing for 50 years,” he said, “and I can’t do it anymore.”

In 2003, eight months before he died, Manchester handed over his Churchill research to Paul Reid, then a Palm Beach Post reporter, and asked him to finish the book. The result is “The Last Lion: ­Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm 1940-1965,” a 1,000-plus-page study of Churchill’s life from his appointment as prime minister in 1940 until his death in 1965.

Churchill is the most commanding British statesman of the modern era, but as with his World War II contemporary Franklin D. Roosevelt, his greatness makes him elusive. “The gravity of his role was obvious,” Reid suggests. “Yet though all saw him, all did not see him alike. He was a multifarious individual, including within one man a whole troupe of characters, some of them subversive of one another and none feigned.”

As Volume 3 opens, the situation facing Churchill and Britain could hardly have been more treacherous. “The Führer’s Reich now basked in a splendorous Alpine dawn born of barbarity, deceit and sheer Teutonic will,” Reid notes. “Britain stood alone in twilight, awaiting the seemingly inevitable descent of darkness.” Although British forces repelled a German invasion that summer, the years 1940-42 would see them endure one humiliation after another. Churchill, though “burdened by defeats, his sensitivities scuffed by the increasing backbiting of backbenchers” and public war-weariness, never flinched. Instead he imbued the war effort with his own constant mantra of “K.B.O.” — Keep Buggering On. That resilience underpinned his elaborate efforts with Roose­velt, first to woo him, then to keep him focused on the Western Front in Europe and finally to thwart the president’s suggestion to Stalin that it might be better if they met alone without the British prime minister.

In the summer of 1945, as the war concluded, the British electorate rewarded Churchill with “the Order of the Boot.” He would return to office six years later, but spent the intervening period working on his war memoirs. The six volumes were extremely lucrative and helped Churchill win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953; more important, they allowed him to write his own heroic legend — a formidable hurdle for subsequent biographers to jump. “History will judge us kindly,” Churchill told Roosevelt and Stalin in 1943, “because I shall write the history.”

Reid, of course, also has to contend with another reputation. He is a Red Sox fan, as was Manchester, and has compared his task in writing this volume to finishing a game for Ted Williams. Certainly Reid has tried to maintain the spirit of the first two volumes. Some critics found those earlier works overlong, but Reid passes a kind of test by writing at similarly great length. His palpable enthusiasm at thinking about Churchill demonstrates once again, were it needed, the grip this iconic figure can still exercise on the imagination.

The book works best when Reid is using his journalist’s eye to pick up on small details or points of color that illustrate a wider truth. For example, he vividly retells a story about a game of poker involving Churchill and Harry Truman. The president had warned his card-­playing cronies to watch out, because the former prime minister had played poker for more than 40 years and was bound to be “an excellent player.” It didn’t take them long to realize he was in fact “a lamb among wolves.” In the end, Truman had to bail out Churchill by telling the others to go easy on him. “But boss,” one of the president’s friends complained, “this guy’s a pigeon!” It was a perfect metaphor for the “special relationship” in 1946.

Such Anglo-American meetings provide the finest moments in “Defender of the Realm.” About British history and politics, however, Reid is on less sure ground. Some mistakes count for little, but it matters that Stanley Baldwin, not Neville Chamberlain, was the prime minister who appointed Anthony Eden as foreign secretary in 1935, and that the Labour cabinet minister, Aneurin Bevan, was never the “administrator” of the National Health Service. Reid offers an explanation for why Churchill loathed left-wing intellectuals educated at what is here called Winchester University — actually Winchester College, and no university: rather, it’s an elite private boarding school rivaling Eton and roughly similar to Groton in the United States. As these and other solecisms and errors pile up, the reader is left with the uneasy sense of an author whose command of British politics and society is only skin deep.

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With so many books already written about Churchill, it’s hard enough to say anything new, but Reid’s shaky grasp on things British makes it even harder. Figures like Lord Halifax and Rab Butler, who were advocating a negotiated peace with Hitler in 1940, are presented as “embittered,” “whining” and “defeatist” at a time when “Englishmen everywhere were scorning any suggestion of negotiations.” Maybe so, but as historians like John Lukacs have shown, the debate in the cabinet from May 24 to May 28 about seeking a negotiated peace was an incredibly close-run thing, with Churchill’s “never surrender” stance initially the minority view.

Churchill was at his brilliant best in these meetings, gradually infusing those present with a belief in his vision for staying the course. But by making opponents out to be fools or knaves, Reid diminishes both the drama of the moment and Churchill’s achievement in swinging the cabinet behind him.

The conventional nature of Reid’s analysis is also reflected in the text’s imbalance. Reid writes at considerable length about the 1940-45 wartime government, giving this central period in Churchill’s life more than 900 pages. But a rich literature already exists on these years, and the story has been told better by others. Maybe it is perverse to criticize a book of more than a thousand pages for not being long enough, but by giving the less traveled territory after 1945 so little attention, Reid has missed an opportunity. The last 15 of the 25 years to which this volume is devoted are dispatched in a mere 61 pages.

Admirers of William Manchester may buy this book because it reminds them of earlier times spent in his company. Yet it is difficult not to conclude that his legacy and reputation would have been better served by leaving him standing alongside Churchill in May 1940, ready and poised for the approach of that “finest hour.”

THE LAST LION

Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm 1940-1965

By William Manchester and Paul Reid

Illustrated. 1,182 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $40.

Richard Aldous is the Eugene Meyer professor of British history and literature at Bard College and the author, most recently, of “Reagan and Thatcher.”

A version of this review appears in print on December 23, 2012, on Page BR12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: ‘We Shall Go On to the End’. Today's Paper|Subscribe